Building a Website that Ranks

Whether you’re just starting out on your digital journey, or you already have a presence that isn’t performing as it should, creating a website that achieves your goals and represents your business in the right way can feel impossible to build sometimes.

Thankfully, the prices associated with every aspect of website design are now more cost-effective than ever. A reputable web design company will have a proven track record dealing with businesses with similar goals to your own, and an experienced team that can deal with all aspects of your site.

How do you ensure your website achieves your goals?

A great website requires lots of factors to come together in harmony. These include, but aren’t limited to design, copywriting, keyword research, and high-quality backlinks. Each of these has several elements that need to be perfected for your website to work. For example, copywriting needs to be relatable to your audience, which requires research, as well as incorporating keywords and longtail search terms in the right places and quantities, all while appearing natural and appealing.

If you want your website to rank well and remain on Google’s radar you need to get noticed, and once your noticed and visitors start increasing you need to ensure they stay around long enough to let Google know your site contained useful information. If they visit several pages of your site and read some information, even better.

Creating a site capable of this means you have to have all SEO bases covered, but then provide your visitors with an enjoyable user experience and useful information in a relatable way.

What elements of SEO do I need?

Let’s assume that you’ve got a great website designed exactly how you want it, whether it’s for building brand awareness or e-commerce. What elements that are traditionally specific to SEO that you should also incorporate to ensure your website gets noticed and ranks well?

There are so many aspects to SEO it’s hard to create an analogy, we could refer to it as a spider or an octopus, but eight legs isn’t enough. Maybe a centipede is more appropriate.  However, the real skill is in prioritising the ones your business needs the most. The goals of each business differ, some will want to trade all over Europe, others the world, while some are only interested in appealing to people that can physically visit their location.

These are just a couple of factors that should be considered and can provide a number of different routes. In reality, there are closer to a hundred considerations when designing a website for SEO, and many of them are universal and will be carried out by any competent web design business, but the real value is added by understanding the specific goals of the business and tailoring the non-standard elements to maximise your budget.

Professionals know SEO is painstaking

Anyone can drive traffic to a site by throwing money at advertising. The problems begin when the budget runs out or the amount you need to spend to generate the required amount of traffic is just unrealistic. When SEO is done well, it will provide organic growth by providing a continuous flow of visitors free of charge. Most people relate ranking well to Google. However, lots of search engines are considered, it’s just that Google is the most popular and widely used search engine, so does dominate many conversations.

Thankfully, Google understand the importance of SEO to businesses and provide clear guidelines that help professionals help you. Some people will think they’re doing everything right but not get the expected results. This can be for any one of several reasons. Firstly, Google regularly update what they believe is acceptable, and anyone who has attempted any shortcuts may well be penalised.

Many web-designers will tell you about shortcuts, but most of them are either frowned upon so have a negative impact on your website, or they inhabit a grey area that will become frowned upon in the near future, ultimately harming your site. The truth is SEO requires a long-term commitment. Organic growth and traffic from your digital presence should not be viewed as a supercar, but more like an oil tanker. It takes time to get going and to make adjustments, but once it’s up to speed not much will stop it.

What is SEO?

Successful SEO requires multi-dimensional skills that are hard for a single person to possess, and even harder to perform them all to a high standard, such as (but not limited to):

• Website design
• A thorough understanding of your business
• Domain management
• Copywriting
• Research and analysis
• Information architecture
• Accessibility
• User experience (UX)
• Keyword research

You may also want to incorporate other important factors into your website, such as social media marketing and software development to name two. Professionals will select the tools relevant for you and have a proven track record of doing so.

It’s hard to get right

Don’t be fooled into thinking you can add some keywords, page titles and meta descriptions and the following week you’ll be on the first page of Google. Successful SEO is complex, and while we could provide a step-by-step guide for someone just starting out, it would take us a year to write it.

A further level of complexity is added by the fluid nature of SEO. Every time Google updates its guidelines professionals adjust accordingly. If they’re good at their job it won’t require too much work. However, the 5 million articles that have been written about the old requirements are still floating about on the Internet giving people out of date information.

Picking any one item leads to all the others, such as a good user experience requiring genuinely unique and useful content, page and website design that follows all the best practices that engage users (avoiding confusion or annoyance that creates a high bounce rate), optimised to appeal to your ideal customers, have a responsive design so the user has the desired experience no matter what device they use, use Google Webmaster tools to geotarget your site accordingly if required, perform keyword research and ensure you use relevant keywords and phrases that are highly relevant while maintaining the quality of the content. The list could go on and on and on…

Conclusion

SEO is a crucial part of any website that wants to be seen. However, while complex, it doesn’t have to break the bank or fry your brain. Using professionals like Juvo ensures you have a team of specialists on your side to ensure every aspect of your website gets the specialised attention it deserves.